Grave (38 page)

“What happened to you? Where did you even go?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

The big things were all hers and not mine, same as always. Same as when she was director-in-chief of the whole entire lab, even though she was nothing now but a dried-up stick thing crouching in the dust. But that would all change, I had it in me to change all of it. I clutched Sukie where she was curled up safe in my jacket and smiled. It was disgusting, what happened to people when they’d stopped being young and there was nothing keeping them from drying up and blowing away just like everything around us, every flowering thing, and nothing convinced me of how right the lab’s work had been like the sight of her. Her hair gone dust-gray, strands all uneven and broken off and great salmon ribbons of scalp, dry scaly scalp, showing through. Lines all over her face that hadn’t been there at all, just a year ago. Shaking in her hands. Shaking in her throat. I had it in me to change all that. And everything else.

“I didn’t leave you there on purpose,” she was saying. Nattering, chattering, like old people do, about stuff far in the past that didn’t matter a damn. “I—you don’t want to know what it’s been like for me, Natalie, since all this happened, I wouldn’t want you to know. I’m here now, anyway.” She gave me one of those smiles, those awful determined smiles people only paint on their faces when they’re neck-deep in crap and need to believe they can sing and dance their way out of it. “We’re here.”

We were there, all right. What did that have to do with any-thing? She used to be so efficient, Grandma was, all brisk and no-nonsense and she told you right out what she was going to do to you, why she was doing it, you understood when you were in her hands that you were part of something big and important.
I
understood, anyway, Stephen just screamed and screamed but that was his lookout. He didn’t even remember it now, I bet. Grandma had places to go. None of that arms-around-you nonsense either, a little pat on the cheek if she were happy with you but that one touch was like a scent, it lingered with you for days.

I didn’t like this woman. I wanted Grandma back.

“I never told you my name,” she was saying. Rocking back and forth where she sat, like stupid Lisa in one of her hair-pulling moods, what
happened
to her? Why did I need to know her name? “Ellen. I’m Ellen.” She laughed, a cracked crooning sound. “Of course, that used to be classified information too. But what wasn’t. What wasn’t? Call me Ellen, Natalie. Doctor, Grandma, after what we’ve made of the world, honorifics are a little beside the point, don’t you think?”

It was just way things were right then that was making her sound crazy, the horrible air and the drifting, disintegrating specters of dead people. So many of them, pushed so tightly into such little bits of space that they were more like solid blocky columns of air than people; you might see one little hand reaching out from the mass, a lonely reproachful pair of eyes staring back at you from the nothingness, but they were all just
there
and so you didn’t really see them. And then, even as you were looking at them, there was nothing left to look at anymore. It was probably too late for me to save them, by the time I got things right side up again they’d probably all be gone. First, though, to get Grandma back to her old self. I was pretty smart and she’d taught me a lot, but I could only do what I could do. I needed her. The
old
her, not whoever this was.

“I know something that was Death’s secret,” I said.

I felt a little jump and skitter inside me, saying that out loud without a whisper, and that bit of cowardice irritated me so I spoke louder. “I know how to get around Death, how the lab used to defeat him all those times. All those times with me and all the others. And none of... thisÖ matters, because the secret’s out and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

There were only a few stones still left in my jacket pocket but it didn’t matter, right down the road from us there were more and you couldn’t kill rocks, not like you could trees and birds and people. I pulled one out, a plain gray one I held out in my palm for Grandma to see. Vibrating at my touch, shuddering, growing hotter and hotter there in my palm until I cried out between my teeth, I couldn’t help it, and then just like before it split open. Tarry blackness inside, spilling out, turning sugar-brown and sandy when it mixed with the oxygen in the air—except in this air it took longer, slower, not such a pretty candy-sandy color but the tarnished brown of a bad apple. It didn’t matter. I could still feel it inside me, a wonderful ache inside my own bones as the tarry stuff changed and turned dry. Growing pains. I cupped my hands so the sand wouldn’t spill, and smiled at Grandma.

“It’s a rare thing,” she said. Putting a fingertip to the sand. “When this happens spontaneously. Extremely rare. But hardly unprecedented.”

That didn’t bother me because for a moment she actually looked like her old self, quizzical and knowing and impossible to please. She still thought I had to please her. But that was all right, because when I explained it all to her she’d realize
she
had to please
me
.

“It doesn’t just
happen
,” I said. “I make it happen. I can make them break open. It’s because of me.”

“It happened spontaneously at the lab, once or twice—not with experimental participants like you, just random workers who were handling them and got a surprise. As I recall, we could never work out just why it happened, or how, without our having to break them open mechanically...” Her face grew thoughtful. “They meant to try and run studies but we could never get the funding, too much outlay for too little potential result. Always, the fights for funding. If they had only understood what we were trying to do, so much would’ve been different.”

One or two others at the lab. Whatever. “Well, I don’t see your ‘random workers’ here now,” I said. I studied the bad-apple-colored stuff cradled in my palm. It wasn’t painfully hot anymore, but holding it was still like having a tiny little flame all my own, flickering stubbornly against the bleakness around us; it made me feel better, it reminded me who was really in charge of things now. All of this could be fixed. The clustering ghosts seemed to draw back when they saw me split the stone open, clearing a space, watching to see what could possibly happen next. Good. They were Death’s and already I had what was his on the run.

“You’re right, of course,” Grandma said. Ellen. I just can’t think of her as “Ellen” but that’s what you called a working colleague, their first name, that was how you showed you were equals. Ellen. “That stuff you’ve got, right there, the stones—that was how we did it. That was what we used in our experiments, to bring the dead back. We were trying to replicate its chemical properties, create a serum or—”

“I know what it’s for,” I said. Airy and casual, just to show her she wasn’t the only one who knew things. Had she forgotten just how much she’d taught me, on purpose, before the sickness came? “I’ve used it. I used it to bring two people back, two people I killed myself, I—” I bent my head down and before she could stop me, blew the bad-apple powder gently from one palm to another. Some got scattered and lost, but not all of it. “Into their mouths, their nostrils. Breath of life. It worked. Both times, it worked.”

“Then you were lucky,” Ellen said.

She didn’t look nearly as impressed as she should’ve, just drew her knees closer up to her chest and folded her arms in their huge flapping men’s sweatshirt even tighter. “First, you were lucky the stones opened up at all. Even with our best equipment, no matter what we tried, sometimes nothing could make them crack, it drove us—”

“It’s got nothing to do with luck,” I snapped. Lectures, always the lectures, she never just talked like an ordinary person—she did realize I didn’t work
for
her anymore, right? Didn’t she? We worked together now. “It’s control. It’s power. It’s being the
right
person, trying to open them. It’s never not worked, for me. Ever. It just took me a while to realize what that meant.”

She kept shaking her head but she liked that idea, she liked thinking it was all control and power and will and I could see that in her eyes. Too bad for her that it was me who had all that, not her, she’d have to treat me differently now. “Well,
we
couldn’t always do it, and couldn’t work out why. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the process—we found the substance by accident, we found out what it could do by accident. Whether or not we could make it do that seemed entirely arbitrary, and not really up to us. And even when we could, and we used it—it didn’t always do what it was supposed to do. It didn’t always bring the dead back. Or bring them back as themselves.”

Still shaking her head, dry flyaway cotton-wool hair floating away from her cheeks, like a palsy or nervous tic. “So many experimental participants brought back damaged, useless, all the neurological—we were always so careful never to say research
subjects
, that word was forbidden. Subject to. Subjection. Not good. You were participants.” She stared me with eyes suddenly fierce, piercing, like I’d sneered at her, demanded she justify herself. “And you were. Weren’t you? Didn’t I start teaching you what I knew, before... all this? You would’ve risen very high, Natalie. You were one of our most significant successes and you would’ve been one of our best scientists, when you were older. I’d have personally seen to it.”

She didn’t get it, did she? I didn’t need her seeing to anything. I had what I’d sought. Almost. Almost there. “I know it works,” I said. “You know it works. But why does it work? What’s in here, in these stones, that does this? I looked for the files, the studies, but everything was such a mess for a while and then I think some pipes burst in the winter, a lot of printouts got lost—”

“That’s just it,” she said, smacking a palm against a fallen branch. “That’s just it. We could never figure out a
consistent
method for opening the rocks, extracting what was inside, and whenever we tried running tests, it actually vanished. I’m not joking—it would just dissolve right in front of our eyes, or if we did manage to salvage any, minutes later the vial, the slide would be empty. Not even the most microscopic traces left. It was like it had a mind of its own, like it could sense whenever we wanted to learn its secrets, and so it ran away.”

That scowl, that was a flash of the old Grandma: not hot anger, but cold frustration that the universe wouldn’t bend all the ways she needed it. “So you see, we were stuck with always judging our moment, when the stones graciously decided to open up, and—”

“Janey,” I said. God. Why had it only
now
even occurred to me, why the hell had I just sat there all this time, like an idiot, when I could’ve been doing this for her? She’d been well within her time to revive, I could have saved her before her body somehow slipped beyond my—Janey. She’d tried to defend us back at Paradise City, me too, not just Stephen. I wished I’d had some lipstick to give her, a pair of high heels. She loved high heels, Don would raid closets in empty houses to find them for her. Her pretty blonde hair I’d always envied had turned dark and crusted on one side of her head, her skull was split open but that wouldn’t have mattered, I knew I could have—desperately I scanned the flotsam of dead faces drifting past, huddled shoulder to shoulder like they were cold and wandering lost, bewildered, all around us, but she wasn’t there.

Poor Janey, gone, and it was all my fault. But I was still here. Death was too scared to get rid of me and that’s how I knew, despite everything, that I was going to win.

“I have what Death wants,” I told Grandma. Ellen. “I have the stones.” I tossed a few of the emptied, split-open fragments of the gray one carelessly away. There were always more. “I have the knowledge of what’s inside, and the gift to use it. Stephen ran off on a wild goose chase for his precious Amy, when he can’t even save his own behind for trying—but I’ve got what saved them both right here, and nobody else gets their hands on it. Nobody.”

I could smile about that again, savor the quiet well-earned glee smoldering like a coal inside my chest; I’d stood Death down twice now, and I was still standing while everyone around me fell. That meant something. It meant something good. “I’m the last one left with the gift. The last one. I’ll learn how it works, I’ll coax it into showing me its secrets—you saw, it didn’t disappear in
my
hands. I’ll learn what it’s all about. You watch me. What the lab started, I’m going to finish.” I swept an arm through the thin filthy air, sweeping the ruin of earth out of my vision like crumbs off a table. Temporary. All temporary. “And all of this, I’m going to bring back.”

Grandma, Ellen, her head jerked up and she stared at me with amazement in her eyes, dismayed disbelief and also this wary look like someone who’d been expecting a fight. Was spoiling for one. “You’ve only ever managed to revive two people,” she said, “and that out of sheer luck. And that’s all. Just like no matter what we tried, we failed a hundred times as often as we succeeded. And now—”

“
Two people
!”

Who the hell did she think she was, sitting there talking like that? Saying only
luck
had managed what I’d done? She’d just got through telling me I’d have been one of them, if the plague hadn’t happened, she’d have trained me up to be part of her team. She’d just
told
me. Except I didn’t need a team, and I didn’t need her. Not anymore. “I brought two people back, days ago I did that, and one of them was a lot colder than you ever let me get when you—I did that. I have the secret. If you think you can stop me, you just try.”